


En Route

by gondalsqueen



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, But none of us is really confused about what happens on the Falcon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, First Time, Missing Scene, Past Sexual Assault, The Empire Strikes Back, and the sex is so much more graphic i can't even i hope you are blushing too, but their psychological effects are graphic, the actual traumatic events are vague--so vague, the road to Bespin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 16:50:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6123064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gondalsqueen/pseuds/gondalsqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“My hands are dirty, too. What are you afraid of?” </p><p>A ship with locked hatches, and not being able to take things back. </p><p>But from the moment she lets Han kiss her—she LETS him KISS her, and she kisses back—they know where this road will end up. Really, both of them have already known for a while. She’s just decided to stop fighting.</p><p> </p><p>This is another Han and Leia en route to Bespin first time scene. There are many like it, but this one is mine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	En Route

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [ ShannonPhillips ](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ShannonPhillips/pseuds/ShannonPhillips), who is sharp as a tack and considerably more eloquent, for beta reading. 
> 
> This story is a fantasy in two senses:  
> -It is sex, sex, and more sex.  
> -It is all about caretaking. 
> 
> On the one hand, it is super realistic in looking at the aftermath of trauma. On the other, it is profoundly self-indulgent. 
> 
> Basically, I just went ahead and explained all the things we're not supposed to talk about. Uhm, enjoy? 
> 
> And if anyone's up for talking about Leia's psychology in ESB, from her haggard, hopeless looks in the command center to her screaming fights with Han to her dislike of being touched to her showing Han affection only when standing behind him to her awkward attempts at a romantic relationship on Bespin to her holding Han's hand while confronting Darth Vader... I am here for you!

“My hands are dirty, too. What are you afraid of?”

A ship with locked hatches, and not being able to take things back.

But from the moment she lets Han kiss her—she LETS him KISS her, and she kisses back—they know where this road will end up. Really, both of them have already known for a while. She’s just decided to stop fighting.

Over those weeks, Leia comes to adore Chewbacca. Chewie stays out of their way—she has no idea where someone so big can go on a ship this size to make so little noise—when it’s prudent. And the rest of the time there he is, talking to her the same as always, offering her part of whatever he’s cooked, telling her funny stories, exchanging glances whenever Han does something _patently stupid_ with the Falcon’s machinery. Her Shyriiwook gets much better.

Threepio is another story. But if his need for constant validation annoys them, well, he is also easily distracted with hours-long research projects.

Which leaves Leia and Han in almost privacy.

But for the first time in her life, Leia is uncertain in the pilot’s seat. Han knows what he’s doing. She doesn’t. And up until this point, she’s never wanted to. Sure, there have been…nice boys (and scoundrels. But some of those scoundrels _were_ nice boys). But so many people of all varieties have pursued her so aggressively that she’s made a practice out of shutting them down cold, and now she doesn’t know how to turn off the ice without feeling like she’s lost a skirmish in that long war.

And sitting in the pilot’s seat with Han is awfully like a skirmish. His lips tasting and pulling at hers, over and over, his hands framing her face. Her own hands playing at the nape of his neck—he needs a haircut. Then his palms moving over her body, rough and firm and immensely comfortable. High on her thigh and then higher still, and then pushing between her legs and relieving that pressure he’s built, and oh yes, given a place to center herself, she rocks eagerly against his touch. Her own hands stay at his neck, his shoulders, but she can feel him firm against her ass, and when she grinds down into his lap, his answering groan reassures her. A rough tug pulls her shirt from her waistband, and then one hand slips underneath her clothes, foreign and suddenly real against her bare skin.

She grabs his wrist and stands, managing not to fall over in the process, the word “no” dying before it’s spoken, that denied permission blazing in her eyes.  And then it’s over, Han left standing with a hurt and angry expression on his face, trying against his nature to swallow it down because he knows exactly how far a defensive Leia will escalate the fight if he lashes out.

It isn’t fair to Han. She never initiates anything. He starts it—carefully, seeming blasé, afraid of her snapping at him for no reason that he can see. And she encourages him, pushing up against his hands, small noises of approval, meeting eagerly whatever he brings to the table. Until she doesn’t.

She feels like some other person, putting the real Leia to the side and playacting at romance. Which is stupid, because she cares about Han. “I care about you a great deal,” her aggressively casual words echo back to her, but it’s not like that, not really. She loves Han, not the star-eyed way that space opera lovers look at each other (at least she doesn’t think so, not yet). She really _loves_ him, because he has stayed at her side with a ready blaster for three years and made all the jokes she desperately needed to hear and never once treated her like a princess—not really. She loves him as a _person_. And despite his threats of leaving, he feels the same way about her. Any experience in the bedroom puts a thin, unfamiliar skin on this much more solid feeling.

So against everything in her nature, Leia hangs back—figuratively and literally, too. She can show Han affection—she can start things—if she stands behind him. Little kisses on the side of his face, shoulder rubs—she can do that. It still feels foreign to her, but Han has stood by patiently (okay, not patiently) over the years and taken her proverbial punches, and he has to be proverbially bruised after all this time. She wants to fix that. And his shoulders are warm.

90% of her wants him and is committed to _having_ him, because she always gets what she wants. 70% of her is disgusted with her own humiliating defeat in showing him that she likes him. The situation defies even simple mathematics. It’s intolerable.

So she deals with intimidation as she always does. She sticks her chin in the air and marches right up to it.

That’s how she finds herself knocking on Han’s cabin door an hour into Chewie’s turn on watch.

Han is getting ready for bed, shirt off. Leia knows that his shoulders are broad. She knows that his waist tapers to that line of a hipbone above low-slung pants. She’s even familiar with that sprinkling of brown hair across his chest and how it streams lower. But last time, she studiously did not look, and now, she’s transfixed.

She doesn’t have to say anything—the white undershirt and cold-hardened nipples and hair gathered loosely at the nape of her neck make her intentions clear. But Han talks. “You sure you want to come in?” he asks, and then her lips are on his and his back is against the wall. Yes, she’s sure.

And she’s made a good decision, because the pressure of his lips makes her tingle all the way down to the soles of her feet. This isn’t the tongue, teeth, lips dance of their usual making out. Han lets her go up on her tiptoes and push against his mouth and suck lightly at his tongue. A slow drumming begins in the pit of her stomach.

Then the rasp of rough palms down her sides and under her shirt. Han doesn’t let on that he’s watching her, careful of her response.

And stars, does she ever respond.

Hands warm on her breasts, cupping, circling the nipples. She twists her hip, pushing the bone against his—yes, there—beginning erection. Han bends his head (the skin on his shoulders, brown, catches the yellow lamplight) and clasps his mouth on a breast right through her thin shirt (everything about him is warm).  

Somehow they stumble to the bed. Leia remembers the flash of cold when he removes her shirt and shorts, and the rough rasp of hair against her hands as she helps Han slide his own pants off. And then they are kissing and twining every piece together, his mouth on her neck and breasts, his hand on her abdomen and slipping lower. His fingers play between her legs, working more and more intimately. _Is this all right?_ a warning part of her mind asks. _Shut up. Yes_ , she tells it.

Han takes his time playing, hands and lips making their way around her body as she writhes and lets her own hands wander. Leia, never patient about what she wants, would prefer him to move a little faster. But Han Solo, to no one’s surprise, is a tease.

Finally she’s slick against his fingers and panting under him, and he moves over her.

Her insides are hot and the weight of his hips feels good covering her, and she parts her legs eagerly, and oh, he feels GOOD nudging against her there…

…and then he enters her, hot and much larger than she expected, and desire shuts down cold, like a flipped switch. She clenches.

Han is watching her face. She’d been eighteen when they met, and there certainly hasn’t been anyone in the interim, and if he hasn’t actually asked, well, he probably doesn’t need to at this point. So he sees…something. “Leia?”

“It’s fine.” Okay, not the best cover. That was how she’d responded when the blaster bolt hit her leg, too.

“Talk to me.”

“It’s FINE. I’m fine. Don’t stop.” She plants a foot against the bed and pushes up onto him. It hurts. Not badly—she can certainly get through this without much pain and it _will_ be fine and she’ll work her way through this reaction. And all the other parts have been nice. But all of her eagerness has drained away.

Han withdraws. “No. We’re not doing that. I don’t want it to be FINE. I want it to be good.”

He doesn’t always understand about making do. Leia huffs a frustrated breath through her nostrils, but the tantrum approach will never work. She changes tacks, stroking his jaw, the skin for once smooth and newly shaven. But Han isn’t having any of it. “Leia—” He strokes her hip, thumb rubbing an old scar. “We should have talked a long time before this. What are we up against, here?” He’s backed off of “your Worship” and “Your Highness,” and even “Princess” lately, and he must know better than to add “Sweetheart” just now, when she already feels so much younger than him.

She’s been ducking this conversation for ages.

Can he possibly not know?

“I always figured it was Alderaan that kept your hackles up. And you’ve got every right. But this is more than that. This is something physical. Hey—” _Look at me_ , his tone says, and she stops turning her head away defensively, meets his eyes from a safe distance. “Did they hurt you on the Death Star?”

“Yes,” she says, matter-of-factly. But it seems like such a partial truth that she adds, “But it is, mostly, Alderaan.” They hurt Leia Organa, senator and princess and daughter and friend, and then they destroyed Alderaan and that Leia stopped existing, anyway.

He lets out a deflated breath. “Torture?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I figured. Rape?”

The muscles around her eyes twitch. “No.”

He strokes her hip, saying nothing.

“At least, nobody did anything to me for the pleasure of it,” she clarifies. “They had…a variety of devices. None of them was exactly comfortable.” She’s had to relate it so many times by now that this version of the story, just the facts, is easy.

“Holy kriffing stars,” he curses. No pity there—he’s angry. Good. She’s still furious, herself.

She swallows and reclaims some of that even, in-charge tone. “But _this_ isn’t something to worry about. It doesn’t bear any resemblance to that. There’s no reason this should bother me.”

Han gives her that lopsided grin and says, “Yeah, but you never did like to let someone else share command, anyway.”  

She pretends anger, but he’s treating her the same as always, and it feels like victory. Even her pretense is thin, her expression a lampoon of that usual arch distance. He laughs.

“Hey, can I try something?” He kisses her knee. “Do I have your royal permission?”

He’s inviting her into the joke with him, so she steps inside and nods. “What did you have in mind?”

A kiss on her thigh—okay, maybe desire isn’t gone after all—and a kiss farther in—it’s not hard to see where he’s going—and then—

“Oh.” The swipe of his tongue is pure pleasure.

Han’s smug grin irritates her—who does he think he is?—and his fingers between her legs, spreading her bare for him, are cold, clinical points. But before she has time to feel more than a frisson of anger that tongue is back, rough, warm, sliding up and over in an easy rhythm, and “Nnmmm—” She chokes back the groan but it feels too good to worry much about embarrassment. He frets her with the point of his tongue and lathes her hard with its length and sucks and teases her carefully, feeling out what she likes.

She likes it very much.

When he finally slips in two easy fingers and curls them inside of her, the sensation is almost an annoyance, a distraction from the intense build of his tongue on her clitoris. She plants her heel in the mattress. Between that and the frustrated tone she supposes her incoherent cries must have taken on, Han gets the message and withdraws. (“You never have problems making your opinions known, Highness,” he’s told her, time and again.)

Then she has nothing but the sensation of his tongue, firm, steady. He’s found her rhythm now and is flying her up and up and up.

Leia worries that she’s taking too long. She worries that he can’t breathe, that he doesn’t really like this and is only humoring her. She’s frustrated with her inability to climax and get it over with—if it were a matter of her own fingers, this would be so easy. But mostly she has no time for these thoughts, because she’s struggling hard towards that precipice, everything so much sharper than when she tries this on her own.

He keeps her close to the top for a long time, steady and solid and dependable. And then her legs tremble and his hand on her rear tightens and she is so close for so long, and finally his tongue swipes her roughly three times, four times, five, and she’s falling head over heels over head again, instinctively strangling that relieved “Oh,” and then relaxing ( _Relax, Leia_ , she tells herself), and ohhhhhh, she hasn’t felt this open and this comfortable in a long time.

Han’s eyes are black and his grin goofy. He looks immensely satisfied with her reaction as he climbs up next to her. “You blushing or glowing, Princess?” he teases gently, but those eyes are alight with desire and admiration, and there’s no sting in it. She grins back.

Then she closes her hand around him ( _Around his cock, Leia, don’t be such a prude_ , supplies that voice in her head) and his breath catches into some more serious mood. He’s hard, straining against his own desire—she can feel the pulse of blood under her hand, she can even see the channels. And he’s smooth as talc, except for that slick drop she spreads her thumb through at his tip. He swallows hard, the lump bobbing in his throat. “Play all you want, sweetheart. Anything you do’s going to feel good.” So she explores, tips of her fingers petting that soft layer of skin, then grasping him and bringing him higher. He watches her lick dry lips and his erection jumps under her hand. Interesting.

Finally he closes his fist around hers and shows her how to pull in firm strokes, sliding the skin back and forth, tucking her fingers against the vein at the bottom of his shaft. “Try it like this.”

“That doesn’t hurt?” That much pressure and she would be done for the rest of the day. But Han shakes his head, a tight, tense motion. “I don’t think you can squeeze hard enough to make it hurt.”

They shift, Leia easing a thigh over his and scooting closer so that she can bring some dexterity to the situation, probably still stroking with frustrating slowness, as far as he’s concerned. She wants time, though, to let the sight of him sink in, head back and eyes closed and face uncharacteristically tense, the tip of his cock sliding improbably through her tight fist, glistening. That sweet, tight feeling is creeping back into her belly, her heart beginning to thrum again. She tries to speak and has to clear her throat, her own voice coming out low and quiet in her ears. “I want you inside me.”

Han doesn’t say anything for a long moment, because he’s taking a deep breath and schooling himself into stillness. “I’m on the strip. Prophylactics,” he adds helpfully.

And now her voice sounds like the old, in-charge Leia. “So am I.”

His eyes open in surprise and wicked delight. _Why Leia, I had no idea you had these kinds of designs_ , that look teases. But she doesn’t get time to tease back ( _Don’t take it too personally, hotshot_ ), because he’s pulling her on top of him, positioning himself carefully between her legs (not inside of her, not yet), and stroking her thighs with what she has to admit is an expert touch.

The intention here is clear. She shifts her hips and slides super-stimulated areas against the firm line of his cock. Han’s fingers dig in and now it’s his turn for the stifled groans. Not that she can blame him—Leia herself is charged and profoundly wet.

She reaches back to position him. Like this, she can sink down onto him easily. And then Han is inside of her and under her and smiling up at her with that open, happy flash of teeth that is not the smirk.

Her body still shocks to find him so high inside of her, though. One hand goes instinctively to her abdomen. Her eyes must have gone wide, too. “Try working up to that,” Han suggests tightly.

“Mm hmm.” She rocks up, testing, then takes him a bit deeper. “Good?”

He lets out a breath. “ _Good_. Don’t stop.”

Now it’s Leia’s turn to smirk down at him. He must like what he sees, though, because instead of responding with a challenge, he gives her a look of such dopey love that _she_ vows silently to be careful of _him_. Then he runs his hands over her torso, her breasts, and back to the nape of her neck to pull her ponytail forward and wind the long hair loosely around his hand.

Her own position and the ship’s gravity both help. Soon she’s rocking on him steadily, trying different angles, speeding up and moving excruciatingly slow, seeing what’s best. She’s surprised to discover how easy this is, actually. Han’s breathing catches and he lets her hair go and reaches up to cup her breasts, stroking thumbs down the sides. Leia… Well, she hadn’t thought she was that aroused, but his touch sends a shiver down her sides and right between her legs, where she’s sinking back onto him over and over. She clenches, a sharp pang of pleasure, and Han groans in response. Then she flips her hair back—out of the way, she needs to move faster—and he lets out a strange kind of huff when the ends brush his thighs, and she realizes that Han Solo is ticklish.

Oh, Han. He meets her eyes, finally with no angry tension between them. No teasing smile. Just open and honest and trusting her to lead the way. Another realization hits her: This is _nice_. If she’s not practiced enough to fly into another orgasm like this, the feel of his cock inside her and her own controlled slide against that certainly gets her going. The muscles in her thighs work, strong. She could do this for a while.

Han, on the other hand, doesn’t look like he has all that long. The lines of tension harden in his face. He thrusts up to meet her—carefully, not too rough. His hands go to her hips, but he forces them lower down her thighs. His fingers clench and he forces them open, keeps himself from pulling her down hard against him. He needs more, and he’s grazing some delicious place inside of her, and Leia wouldn’t mind having things a little rougher, herself.

“Han.” Her voice holds command and suggestion and permission. “Fuck me.”

For once, he doesn’t bristle at the princess tone. Instead, he laces his hands with hers and thrusts hard. She meets him in an obscene and delightful sound of smacking flesh and watches as he pushes himself towards that point. And if he is, in fact, a bit too high and hard inside of her, it feels like adventure now, and Leia is eager for it. Closer. He shoves up inside of her. There. She squeezes his hands and Han groans and drives deep and spills over.

Then he’s trembling, heated and slick, underneath her. “You can keep going, sweetheart,” he offers. But he looks spent. It’s been a trying few weeks for him, too.

“No. I’m satisfied.” She smirks down at him, and he grins back. His semen pools, slippery, between her legs. She’s a little sore and more than a little overstimulated, but she doesn’t mind. Han is still giving her that goofy grin. “What?”

“Nothing. You look happy.”

Leia considers. “I am.”

She expects some typically Han joke _: It’s a new look on you_ , or _Hey, what’s that thing your mouth’s doing? That’s not a very princess-y expression_. But instead he says: “Damn good thing, too,” and then: “Come lie down on me.”

He really is a very nice man.

Han smooths her hair down her back and kisses her temple. After a while she thinks he’s falling asleep. He must be thinking though, because he says, “You know… You never have to say a thing to me. But if you want to give me some details, sometime, so I know what to avoid… It’s not going to shake me up.” She smiles sleepily against his skin. “Not now. I’m in a good mood now. Ask me tomorrow.”

(Tomorrow he will say, “You’ve never told anyone, have you?” and she’ll tell him matter-of-factly, “I’ve made multiple reports.” “Not like that,” he’ll protest. “Not a debriefing. You’ve never told anyone what it did to _you_ , have you?” And she’ll shrug, eyes walled with whatever it takes to defend herself. Han will say: “It’s okay. You’re not the first person with a past. Yours really takes the prize for extreme, though.” And that should make her feel worse, but instead it makes her feel better. He’ll say: “Let’s get some drinks and I’ll tell you about the _first_ time I went to Ord Mantell.” And they will.)

(Not long afterwards, she’ll think back on that conversation, hoping she gave him some scrap of information he can use to protect himself against Vader. She won’t remember anything helpful.)

But before they get to Bespin he’s taking her on top of the counter in the galley, her touch is no longer gentle, and she’s learned how to taunt him into full alert. She snakes a leg behind him and meets him, fast and eager. The edge of the counter digs into her rear and she arches, smug. The public performance of a relationship still raises all of her uncertain, defensive instincts. But here, within the Falcon’s locked hatches, she’s regained command.

When they get to Cloud City, Leia puts on the brightest and deepest colors she can find and goes into battle holding hands with a good friend.  


End file.
